Hot Seat

Chapter 7. Conclusion

The founding phase is one of the most exhilarating and optimistic stages of starting a company. If I sound like a big wet blanket, it’s because it’s also the stage where companies make the largest number of avoidable mistakes.

It’s hard to get it right.

In 2000, I tried to found a company. I don’t tell the story about it often.

It was the apogee of the bubble. My cofounder Robert DiBenedetto and I created a design for a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). We had no idea what we were doing.

After cold calling a few venture capitalists and getting nowhere, we lucked into a meeting with the U.S. Department of the Navy. We flew out and pitched them on the idea of sponsoring the game. They loved it, and we somehow persuaded them that we were a good investment of $2M taxpayer dollars.

It’s probably for the best that the leadership change happened—in 2001, President Clinton left office, and President Bush brought in new leadership who had no interest in two Microsoft employees who wanted to make a game. They never said no; they just never made any progress, and the idea slowly sunk into oblivion.

As did I—turning into a puddle on the couch, doing “competitive research” on EverQuest, the leading MMORPG, for dozens of hours each week. I did the minimum to hold down my day job. It took a minor intervention on the part of my wonderful wife to shake me out of the funk, eventually resulting in me quitting for my first startup experience at Wildseed, ...